Graduate Student concerns
Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2016 12:08 pm
I haven't seen a topic started by a graduate student yet or one that is specifically about graduate students concerns (but there is a good one about how faculty might have to change graduate student training: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=67) so I figured I'd start one and hopefully encourage more graduate student responses. As a graduate student who has talked with peers in my department and other universities about DART my impression is that graduate students have the same concerns as faculty posting on here about protecting sources, the extra time required to make qualitative data transparent and the potential new divisions and reinforcement of existent divisions between methodologies and subfields in political science. However, there might be some issues that are of special concern to graduate students and junior faculty.
I recently got an email conversation started amongst graduate students in my department and there is a wide-spread concern amongst us all about how DART will affect our career opportunities that are opened up based on publications. There is a desire from us graduate students to know more about DART and so we have recently started to figure out what type of roundtable discussions we can have with our faculty so that we are better informed about the practical implications of DART and how we can do our best to be as transparent as possible. Some of us are concerned about how DART will affect our likelihood of publishing in top-tier journals. Publication in these journals is a big positive on our CVs when we apply for jobs after finishing our dissertation and will remain important as we work towards tenure. This is especially important for graduate students who are not completing PhDs at the best of the best graduate programs. Grad students from outside the most well-respected programs know that publication in a well respected journal in combination with an excellent dissertation will make their applications competitive with graduate students from top-tier programs.
I know a lot of discussion on here has been about how DART can reinforce or create new divides in our discipline, such as discouraging qualitative researchers from publishing in certain journals. I just want to emphasize this can have effects on the career opportunities of graduate students.
I also would like to know more about the specific transparency practices that could create problems specifically for graduate students. One graduate student (in the post linked to at the beginning of this post) mentioned that most graduate students are learning on the fly when they are doing field research. Learning how to take field notes, compile them and knowing what data needs to be gathered in order to answer a question are already difficult tasks. Having to then put this all in a format that can be made available to others is another task that will require time that could be spent on finishing a dissertation. This is not an argument to exempt graduate students but to point out one way in which DART specifically affects graduate students.
I recently got an email conversation started amongst graduate students in my department and there is a wide-spread concern amongst us all about how DART will affect our career opportunities that are opened up based on publications. There is a desire from us graduate students to know more about DART and so we have recently started to figure out what type of roundtable discussions we can have with our faculty so that we are better informed about the practical implications of DART and how we can do our best to be as transparent as possible. Some of us are concerned about how DART will affect our likelihood of publishing in top-tier journals. Publication in these journals is a big positive on our CVs when we apply for jobs after finishing our dissertation and will remain important as we work towards tenure. This is especially important for graduate students who are not completing PhDs at the best of the best graduate programs. Grad students from outside the most well-respected programs know that publication in a well respected journal in combination with an excellent dissertation will make their applications competitive with graduate students from top-tier programs.
I know a lot of discussion on here has been about how DART can reinforce or create new divides in our discipline, such as discouraging qualitative researchers from publishing in certain journals. I just want to emphasize this can have effects on the career opportunities of graduate students.
I also would like to know more about the specific transparency practices that could create problems specifically for graduate students. One graduate student (in the post linked to at the beginning of this post) mentioned that most graduate students are learning on the fly when they are doing field research. Learning how to take field notes, compile them and knowing what data needs to be gathered in order to answer a question are already difficult tasks. Having to then put this all in a format that can be made available to others is another task that will require time that could be spent on finishing a dissertation. This is not an argument to exempt graduate students but to point out one way in which DART specifically affects graduate students.